Tune in today from 1-3 PM on WFMU to get yourself in the mood for Amateur Night. Rex will be playing some of the Fool's Paradise Favorite drinking songs of all time to coax the pink pussy cats out of the closet.

On New Year's Eve 2004 Fortune recording artist Nathaniel Mayer dropped by Spazz HQ for the craziest party of all time; one that the neighbors are still probably pissed about. Nathaniel (for those that didn't know him) cut some incredible records in Detroit in the early sixties including the regional hit Village of Love. By the end of the sixties Nathaniel hit upon some tough times and for decades nobody could figure out if he was alive or dead. Unexpectedly, in 2003 Nathaniel (or "Nay Dog" as he liked being known) popped back on the scene and reignited his performing career. His voice was a little raspier but he still had the pipes. With charisma to spare, no one could work a crowd like Nathaniel and when he sang falsetto it was nothing less than spine chilling. Most of all he was sweet and funny and an all around great guy. What else could you possibly ask for in a soul legend? Nathaniel was cut down by a series of strokes in 2006 and his passing a couple of years later left a hole in many hearts.

Nay Dog was in town for the big Norton Soul Revue at Southpaw and he was in stellar form that night. When I asked him what he wanted to hear he requested Nathaniel Mayer songs. After singing along to every one of his records (with The Diablos' "Ali Coochi" thrown in), Nay Dog requested some Sex Machine-era James Brown, organized the room into two Soul Train dance lines and pretty soon things went from nuts to crazy. He also regaled us with a "dozens" rap that was so smutty it would have made Dolemite blush. Thanks to Billy Miller, Miriam Linna, Michael Hurtt and Dan Rose. I don't remember which one of you brought him to the party (as well as escorting him to the radio show the following night) but I do know one or more of you guys were responsible for this.

Monday, December 26, 2011

As the Everly Brothers said, it’s “So Sad to Watch Good Love Go Bad.” Almost as sad, if you’re a fan of bad TV, is watching one of the species’ strongest contemporary contenders just roll over and play good. Unfortunately, that seems to be what’s happened in the second season of Blue Bloods, CBS’s Tom Selleck starrer about a tri-generational family of NYC cops. It’s a shame too, since the show started out as a shining example of one of the richest but least-traversed goofspaces in all of popular culture: Sentimental Fascism.

The SF genre’s best exponents were, of course, oak-solid, cedar-hewn Chuck Norris’ Walker, Texas Ranger (1993-2001) and the criminally undervalued The District, with Craig T. Nelson as Washington, D.C’s chief cop (2000-2004). Norris’ Walker walked a fine line between heart-tug subplots (to the distraught Latina slapping masa in a tortilla factory: “I’ll see that Jose doesn’t join the gang, Mrs. Garcia”) and Miranda-busting fuzz-play (warrantless door-kicks a specialty). Nelson’s Chief Jack Mannion grew misty around his dog or his single-mom assistant, but played hardball with softie judges, drug lords and his arch-nemesis, a Russky agent named Putin.

What made Blue Bloods such a comer was just what makes the best classic bad TV great: the commitment to craft—the creators’ on-time delivery of piping hot clichés of story and dialogue designed to satisfy loopy, often dated assumptions about the desires of the target demo. CBS’ 2010 decision to launch a series about a tough, conservative commissioner (“Frank Reagan”!), his dad (an ex-commish who rues the day when bulls had to stop using concealed “sappers” [blackjacks] to crack heads) , two cop sons and assistant-D.A. daughter surely reflects the network’s interpretation of the midterm elections as a huge cultural right turn. Clearly, the reasoning must’ve gone, the lumpenprole now crave a liberal-bashing law-and-order show, just as they did when Walker debuted—during the cultural dustup that presaged the Republicans’ 1995 Congressional putsch.

Selleck himself is a laff riot. His toolbox, once overflowing with enough affability and beefcake-lite appeal to power eight seasons of Magnum P.I., now holds just one item: gravitas. The duties of gig, moral grounds-keeping and paterfamilias weigh so heavily on his I-beam shoulders that deep sighs, solemn head-hangs and marathon silences are all he can manage. Those and snippy retorts to his mayor boss—in Season 1 a craven pol (aren’t they all?), in 2 a smug black manager who tells Frank that the city’s “old, white, Irish-Catholic days are over” and gets smacked with Frank’s reply that he, the noble mick, missed out on the benefits of affirmative action and a “community organizer” background. Hoo-boy! Plus, Selleck comes off about as ‘New York’ as you’d expect a 1962 graduate of Grant High, Sherman Oaks, California, to come off.

The kicks came fast when Blue Bloods debuted. How did we know the Reagans were blue-collar anti-elites? At Frank’s pad, kibitzing or enjoying communal Sunday dinners (with offspring a party of 10: those Irish-Catholics!), they drank nothing but beer—out of the bottle. Anti-intellectualism roamed the show like a python, crushing the slightest hint of world knowledge or book-learnin.’ College-educated rookie-cop son Jamie was relentlessly tagged “Harvard” by his dese-dem-and-dose sergeant , “Anthony Renzulli” (those kooky dagos!) and by his own older brother, Danny (ex-NKOTBer Donnie Wahlberg, sporting a Howard Devoto liver-slice haircut), who often reminded Jamie “Remember, you’re not in Cambridge anymore.”

Prosecutor daughter Erin Regan, who at least understood suspects’ rights, was routinely pilloried by Danny and daddy Frank (“Why do we bother catching the criminals if you’re just gonna let them go?”) and her grandfather. Frank’s pappy, ex-commissioner Henry Reagan, once berated Erin for pushing her pre-teen daughter onto an “arts” track in school, potentially ruining the Reagans’ sprint to a four-generation dynasty.

I tell you, it was rich. But now Blue Bloods has had its edges trimmed and usually resembles a run-of-the-mill procedural, its pro-active mildness besting the bad but unfunny Castle only by degrees. There may yet be hope, though. In a recent episode Sergeant Renzulli , at the apartment of a crime victim, asks her what’s playing on her stereo. “Shostakovich,” she answers. “Oh,” says Renzulli. “Sounds like the guy who makes my vodka!”

So... while browsing through old issues of Billboard for info about Mr. Alexander, I stumbled upon this article in the November 7, 1964 issue:

While on the one hand, this does answer the question of why I'd never seen any further records by Henderson, on the other, it just generates further questions. What causes a 27-year old to have a heart attack? A congenital heart defect? Amphetamines (certainly a common thing in the Music City)? Or something else? And why was he bunking with Arthur, rather than his wife and kids? Mrs. Henderson died in 2008, so she's obviously not a good resource.

If you're only going to have one song that people remember, you could do a lot worse than this.

I have no answers for those questions, but thanks to the efforts of crack digital librarian and first-rate spouse Mandy Mastrovita, I do know a few things about where Alexander was as his roomie lay dying:

Homecoming 1964 at the University of Georgia would have been a pretty good weekend to crash some Greek parties. I can't say which one I would have chosen, though. How could you? Not just Mr. Alexander at Chi Psi, but The Five Du-tones, Eddie Floyd, The Tams, The Sensations (I'm assuming it was these Sensations), The Upsetters (minus Little Richard), The Catalinas, whichever sets of "Ambassadors" and "Vibratones" these were... even Dionne Warwick (or "Warlick", as they render it here) would have been worth seeing at that point. Of course, you'd have had to go to a frat party. And, since the Bulldogs apparently won their game by 21-7, they were probably especially wild and rowdy that night.

Chi Psi House, 320 S. Lumpkin St.

Here's a tiny photo of the house where you'd have been attending the party in question; it was pretty new at the time, having only been built in 1960. The frat was kicked off campus for booze violations in the late '80s, and the building was razed in 2004.

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Here is the complete "Jungle 45 of the Week" compilation that I have been sporadically putting up the last year and a half or so. Now you can download it in one fell swoop with a nifty cover by J.R. Williams!

I refer of course, to the "Little Sparrow", Édith Piaf, who would have been 96 today, though realistically, everyone knew she was never going to get that far (as it is, she was lucky to have made it almost halfway). You may question my characterization of her in the above title, but to that challenge, I offer her 1956 rendition of a popular Leiber & Stoller composition about the life and death of a leather-clad motorcyclist thug... and what's more Rock 'N' Roll than that?

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

On this day in the year Nineteen Hundred and Eleven, in the city of Long Beach in the land of California, a child was born unto a humble railroad agent and his bride, and they did christen the infant Lindley Armstrong Jones. And lo, because he was so slender, like unto a railroad spike, men did call him "Spike." And when he became a man, he gathered unto him many odd-looking Disciples, and together they made Music of a nature unlike any the the world had ever heard. And they traveled throughout the land, bringing this Music to all the people, and their Glorious Cacophony brought Joy unto the Multitudes,even unto his death and beyond, and his Song shall sound throughout the world, until the End of Days. Amen.

The Monument Years CD covers Arthur's post-Dot 60s work. Over half of it was unreleased at the time and while there's some duff cuts, most of it sounds great. Arthur is a little bit less despairing than during his Dot years, so there is the occasional lapse in intensity, but not on this great pissed off (and otherwise unreleased) self-penned rant where he actually bucks fate instead of just giving into it. "I PLAY SANTA CLAUS FOR YOU!"

Dan and Travis do a radio podcast. It's called Jazzed Up And Bonkers!! They play funny tapes and dumb songs. Do you like funny tapes and dumb songs? Sure you do. We do too. That's why the staff here at WFMU's Rock 'n' Soul Ichiban are honored that Dan and Travis have created a special episode of Jazzed Up And Bonkers!! especially for the Rock 'n' Soul Ichiban audience. Oh yeah--the stuff they play rocks out like crazy, also. Check out the special Jazzed Up And Bonkers!! episode now!

Although in order to escape personal demons Arthur Alexander ended up dropping out of music & driving a bus in Cleveland for most of the eighties, he did get to experience a comeback of sorts before his passing in 1993. At the time of his death he had just released a new album and was playing many well received shows around the country.Nice that Arthur got to see a little good luck at the end instead of more of the bad luck that seemed to dog his entire career.

He's one of my faves of southern soul & this is going all the way back to his first...

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

It's time for the closing ceremonies of Esquerita Awareness Month, so if you start listening to this as soon as it's posted, it'll end right on time a few seconds before midnight. We're going to play you out with the B-side of Esquerita's last single (the flip can be heard here), his version of the 1931 standard better known for Dooley Wilson's version from ten years later, as heard in Casablanca. I was going to offer up my 78 of that version as well, but I can't seem to locate it, and I have a vague memory that it might have cracked beyond playability some years ago. C'est la guerre. And it's not as if you haven't all heard it, anyway.

Self-indulgent personal note: As a kid growing up in upstate South Carolina in the '70s and '80s, there wasn't much evidence of anything good ever having happened there, so getting my copy of Kicks #3 and learning that Esquerita was from right up the road in Greenville... well, that was pretty gratifying. At last, a fellow South Carolinian who wasn't an embarrassment. I've learned a lot more about local music history since then , -- maybe sometime I'll tell you about the Monstabuckings, from Anderson, for instance-- but that was the first indication that maybe my homeland had spawned something greater than the Marshall Tucker Band*. And for that I'm grateful.

*To be fair, there's a lot worse to be found along the "Southern Rock" spectrum, but growing up in a redneck college town (the worst of both worlds!)gave me an exceptionally low tolerance for all AOR music, whether British- or Southern- accented, which has remained with me throughout life.

As Esquerita Awareness Month draws to a close, we offer up the great man in another of his many aliases (to refresh your memory: Stephen Quincy Reeder, Jr. AKA Eskew Reeder/Eskew Reeder, Jr. AKA Esquerita AKA Esqrita* AKA S.Q. Reeder AKA Eskew "Esque-Rita" Reeder AKA Magnificent Malochi AKA Mark Malochi AKA Fabulash, and probably more that aren't documented) with a fine entry from 1968. The last solo record he'd release during his lifetime, it doesn't seem to have charted anywhere I can find, despite Billboard's prediction:

On a personal note, this is a particular favorite of my lovely wife. I hope you like it , too!

*This is how it's rendered in the songwriting credits on Little Richard's "Dew Drop Inn" and "Freedom Blues". Richard apparently nicknamed him "Excreta", so I guess we should add that one to the above litany of names.